After being quoted just under E£600 for a proper, organised tour of الجيز (Giza) and the other pyramid sites, we decided to go it alone. One chat later with a taxi driver outside our hotel and we had arranged to have him be our driver for the day. I offered him E£150, he countered with E£200, and with that being the maximum I was willing to pay, we had a deal and got under way.
Our first stop of the day was the main reason that most tourists come to Egypt in the first place, the Giza Necropolis, home to the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world to remain standing and substantially intact, the Pyramid of Cheops, amongst others.
What can one say about the pyramids at Giza? Television and books do much to prepare you for them. Who hasn’t seen images of the wonders of engineering on a travel programme or a historical documentary?
We’d also been to the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza and other sites in the Mexican Yucatan, so their Egyptian counterparts came as no great surprise, awesome though they be.
The Great Sphinx was somewhat smaller than I’d imagined, and a little more crumbly, but still a marvel to behold. When you finally arrive here, after four decades of life on the planet and endless exposure to images of these behemoths, it’s hard, in a sense, to conceive of the notion that you’re actually here for the first time. Everything seems strangely familiar.
Nevertheless, we can now cross a major item off our list of things to see before we die. Although they’ve lasted this long, one wonders how much longer these remnants of an ancient civilisation can withstand the suffocating pollution of the current one. Perhaps all of this will have turned to dust in a few hundred years or less.
The hawkers of trinkets and other tourist tat are at their worst here. Nowhere on Earth have I had to endure the high-pressure sales techniques employed at this location, which include running after you and stuffing items into the crease of your elbow or the folds of your clothes, even as you hurry away. These items are ostensibly a gift: “Because I love the Dutch people! You are so good at football!”
After trying to hand back these so-called gifts with no success, I soon adopted to the practice of sincerely thanking my benefactor and then just walking away. I found that these thinly veiled salespeople would then invariably catch up with me and ask me for a small donation towards the gift. Aha! The cat starts to emerge from the bag!
I would then refuse, at which point all pretence slipped away and I was asked to return the very lovely head garment and miniature pyramid. Huh? But you said they were a gift! I thought you loved me! How could you? What an Indian-giver!
Even one’s children become unwilling human crowbars in the unrelenting effort to prise money from their tight-fisted parents. Before you know it, a cunning donkey or camel runner has swooped like a vulture, grabbed one of your children from your side and perched them on the back of a rather disgruntled-looking ship of the desert. You are then encouraged to snap away with your camera and, of course, the moment that you do, the game’s over and the not so subtle gesturing for baksheesh begins.
I make it sound worse than it actually is, as long as you are firm but friendly with these people. God help anyone not up to dealing with this kind of badgering and intimidation, because they’ll be stripped of their last cent by the time they get to the top of the hill and behold Cheops in all its glory. I even saw people pestering tourists for baksheesh without so much as the pretence of something being offered in return. A man was literally approaching tourists, gesturing for cash and — to my great surprise — receiving it from some battle-weary sightseers, who presumably just wanted to be left alone at any cost.
Even the police here will demand baksheesh for helping you. They’ll encourage you, for example, to take a picture of them mounted on their camel and then demand a price for it. The price for all of these services is never very much, up to about E£5, but it does get tiresome.
Nevertheless, the whole Egyptian economy seems to run on this basis and you quickly get used to it, developing a sense of when baksheesh will and won’t be expected. In a public toilet, for example, someone will spring from the shadows and turn on the tap for you to wash your hands. When you’ve finished rinsing them, he’s there with some paper towels. When your hands are dry, he’ll spray some scent on them. And as you leave, he’ll point to the pot of baksheesh for you to do your duty. Operating the tap oneself, finding one’s own paper towel and going without scent seemingly isn’t an option. Just be glad he doesn’t want to hold your cock while you piss.
But I digress. This entry isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about baksheesh. It’s about the glory of the pyramids.
We soaked up as much as we could of the Giza site and were getting hungry as we headed back to meet our taxi driver.
Our next stop was سقار (Saqqara), the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian capital, منف (Memphis). On the way there, our taxi driver took us to a dodgy craft village to get a bite to eat, in spite of my insistence earlier in the day that we were not to be taken to any tourist traps along the way. We were starving by this point, however, so succumbed to his blatant attempt to earn a kickback and ate a filling, if overpriced and not terribly inspired meal there. It was better than the alternative of insisting on being taken somewhere else, with no guarantee that anywhere else would be cheaper or better.
At Saqqara, the actual site was less impressive than Giza, but it was also less busy and there were fewer touts to contend with. An hour was ample to get around the site.
When you’re planning your day, it always seems as if there will be time for more, but these two sites were enough to fill our day. We returned to the taxi and headed back to central Cairo. I paid our driver, baksheeshed him (naturally) for his services, and we crossed the road to our hotel for a short rest before dinner.
Said dinner was a fantastic bowl of كشر (kushari) at the venerable Cairene institution of Abou Tarek. It was completely vegetarian and absolutely delicious. For me, it came as a pleasant change from the conveyor belt of kofta and other meat-based dishes that I’ve been eating over the last few days.
As always, our pale-faced, red-headed children proved a big hit with the dining locals. Local ladies picked them up, kissed them and plied them with sweets while laughing and smiling at us. Lukie loves all of the attention, whereas Eloïse doesn’t really know what to make of all the fuss, but goes along with it, anyway, for the most part.
We’d promised Eloïse an ice-cream, so we stopped off at the perpetually mobbed Koueider bakery on the way back to the hotel. I forewent the ice-cream and instead had cake and coffee at a coffee shop just across the road from our hotel.
We have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for an early departure to the White Desert, where we’ll spend the next five days sequestrated from the chaos of urban Egypt.
That’s marks the end of our Internet access for a while, too, as we’ll be sleeping in a tent with no electricity or other distractions of the modern world.
With just us, our children and the sand dunes around us, this is going to be quite an adventure. Shitting in a hole in the sand may not be for everyone, but given the extent to which technology permeates our daily lives, I can think of no better way to cleanse our minds and bodies than to retreat from the madness for a few days in the solitude of the Egyptian desert.